Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

Shakespeare wrote “Julius Caesar” around the turn of the century, 1599 or 1600. In a story that loosely shadows the rise and fall of Julius Caesar, the Bard of Avon presents a tale of hubris, sycophancy, cowardice, and vengeance. The timeline went from “crossing the Rubicon” to the “Ides of March” – “Et tu, Brute” – “Even you, Brutus”. The real story is one of overweening ambition for fame, glory, and power, a chief feature of the politics of the late Roman Republic. The Roman Senate had begun to neuter itself in destructive and self-negating factions. When it finally rose up, it was too late. In the end, after the ascension of Augustus, the empty shell of the republican form was kept, but the reality was an empire with an emperor, an emperator, an autocrat.

Was the rise and fall of Julius Caesar really the end of the republic? Actually, it could rightly be argued that the crisis had been building over the prior century in occasional civil wars and dictatorships. So, a single break point can be difficult to perceive. Murkiness is a constant problem in historical analysis. Nonetheless, a well-trodden path is discernable, and a superficial facade of government took shape. Are we there yet?

Appearances matter, but are false. Stalin’s Constitution of 1936 was an exemplar of consensual governance and personal rights, in print form only. The reality was clearly different, as exemplified by the NKVD, purges, and a vast gulag archipelago. Adolph Hitler ruled under the emergency provisions of Article 48 of the democratic Weimar Constitution. He had no other constitution. He combined the executive offices of chancellor and president unto himself under an Article 48 “emergency” (the 1933 Reichstag fire, the “Jewish Menace”, the “Red Menace”, etc.) and he was off and running. Are we there yet?

“Emergencies” abound in these scenarios, and are frequently conjured, or grossly exaggerated, for political gain. Is America following a similar arc? Our arc could be said to have begun with the rise of a political movement, Progressivism, with a lot of late 19th century Populism thrown into the mix. The “messiness” of real consensual government with its localism, smelly back rooms, federalism, separation of powers, and checks and balances was thought to be in need of streamlining by a strong chief executive and his administration of “experts”. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson laid out the rationale and FDR raised it to an art form, followed by a host of Democrats from JFK and his “best and brightest” (mostly Ivy League grads), LBJ, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, to Joe Biden. And, now, the Republicans add their own entrant to the list in the person of Donald Trump.

Congress delegated the tariff power to the president in “emergencies” – the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) – and sealed their fate by allowing him to define it. The seed was sown and our arc proceeded. A prior Republican president toyed with emergency-autocracy – Nixon and his wage-and-price controls in the “Nixon Shock” of 1971 – but none operated with such brashness and bravado, completely ignoring the legislative branch, as Donald Trump did in his edict of across-the-board tax increases, his tariff taxes on the world, literally the world. It’s breathtaking.

Congress is only left with a veto. But Congress is a shell of its former self, as the Roman Senate was in confronting Sulla or Julius Caesar. One faction, Trump’s fellow Republicans, have mostly fallen into Trump sycophancy (Caesar sycophancy?) and will prevent Congress from reasserting its Constitutional powers. A few Senate Republicans bucked the toadyism and voted with the minority Democrats to approve a resolution opposing the prior tariff edict on Canada. The House leadership, all Republicans, stonewalled the move to condemn Trump’s imperial decree. Thus, the proposal was relegated to irrelevancy. Evenly divided between Caesaristic sycophancy and neo-Marxism, Congress has cancelled itself.

The irony of it all is that the Democrats are not a responsible alternative. The picture resembles the street scenes of Berlin in 1920s Weimar Germany. Patriotic German war vets faced off against the Bolshevik-inspired Reds in street battles. Many vets were drawn to ultra-right rhetoric and its mythology of victimhood about the war (WWI) while the Reds were excited for headway in the international proletarian revolution. Today, the choice facing Americans is between neo-Marxism (the Democrats) and a mythology of perpetual American victimhood (the Trump Republicans).

The victimhood angle of the ultra-right in Germany – the “stab in the back” legend – strikingly parallels the trade victimhood of the Trump Right. Victimhood sold well in 1917 Russia, 1920s and 30s Germany, and apparently so in America of the 21st century’s third decade. Victimhood is embraced by both the left and right. Both have their competing oppressor/oppressed schticks.

History provides examples of these various appeals devolving into the leadership of a single person, the so-called cult of personality. The leader alone (Marx, Lenin, il Duce, etc.) are thought to possess the unique gifts of foresight to establish the “truth” and the “path forward”. Power accumulates in the hands of the leader and a select few around him. He is acclaimed to be the embodiment of wisdom.

Roman emperors carried the title of Augustus – exalted, venerable. Emperor was the reality, but they were construed to be the wise guarantors of the “rights” and “prosperity of the people”, and the nation’s “protector”. Their power need have no constitutional writ, but these suzerains still felt compelled to maintain the illusion of a republic.

At this point, the system falls victim to Hayek’s “knowledge problem”. Like all accurate insights into the human condition, it is rooted in human nature and thus a warning for all time. It’s a testament on how a professed victimhood can lead to a real and widespread victimhood. The movement’s scheme of centralized economic decision-making can’t work. Real functional knowledge is naturally dispersed among millions of actors in a free market. When that freedom is replaced by the “wisdom” of the one or a few, whether it be a politburo, a Soviet Gosplan, or handpicked toadies in the Council of Economic Advisers to reorder the entire world’s trading system, the wheels come off the cart. We’ve seen this play out time and time again. Well, here we go again.

The light hand of negotiations and trade deals is replaced by the heavy hand of Trump’s tariff Frankenstein. Your friends become cynical of you, and your enemies remain as they were, with a few more joining their ranks.

An examination of Trump’s tariff monster makes this clear. Who gets hit by Trump’s tariff truncheon? Everybody, friends and foes alike; well, no, not everybody, nor evenly. Friends get especially slammed because they are friends. We trade with them a lot and therefore they run the risk of having a “trade surplus” with us. The economic munchkins running the tariff show in Trump ll are fixated on “trade deficits” and “trade surpluses”. They are all that matters to these blinkered apparatchiks.

Their magic tariff formula is based on our “trade deficit” with that country, with a 10% floor, not that nation’s tariffs. So, the much-ballyhooed reciprocity argument is made mute. Others in the media, such as Hugh Hewitt, try to act as shaman of Trump’s brain like an ancient seer reading a flock birds before a battle, trying their best to make sense of Trump’s recklessness. Reciprocity was one angle. Then it was Trump implementing the Art of the Deal. When that couldn’t hold water, national security against the threat of the CCP jumped to the top of the shrinking list of rationales. Then the tariffs targeted the world, with or without the CCP, with no guarantee that they’ll be dropped, or if they’re negotiable.

That leaves my pet theory for Trump’s tariff fetish. Look no further than Trump’s 1990s dalliance with the Perot/Buchanan Reform Party and their fixation on Perot’s “great sucking sound” (jobs lost to Mexico). Vance alluded to it – self-sufficiency – in his recent verbal fusillade directed at RedState blogger Bonchie. The word for national self-sufficiency is autarky. The ancient, primitive drive for national or tribal self-sufficiency – autarky – has fueled the lust for conquest and empire for thousands of years. The peaceful trade to fill national or tribal needs and wants is seen as less ennobling than the thrill of military subjugation. The Mongols headed south to conquer China, then the Hun bands headed west to lay waste to Russia and the Hungarian plain, threatening the Roman Empire. Operation Barbarossa in June of 1941 was emblematic of autarky in the form of “lebensraum”. 19th century colonialism rode on its back. Don’t trade, seize, and in that way achieve self-sufficiency.

For Trump, take the Panama Canal and Greenland, intimidate Canada into being a client state, and punish American consumers for preferring foreign goods while simultaneously terrorizing American firms from their overseas economic arrangements. Bring everybody home and lock up the country while expanding its territorial reach. Attila would be envious.

Autarky is a fool’s errand. Poor countries are self-sufficient. They never develop; they are stunted. Development requires freedom, not an empowered few implementing the errant beliefs of a hubristic leader and his claque. America under Trump is forsaking the decades-long web of peaceful and voluntary trade arrangements for the diktats of what has quickly come to resemble an imperial court. The spectacle would have been familiar to anyone given access to Attila’s tent.

The metamorphosis of the Right is shocking to behold. Former free traders when Reagan was around have morphed into full-blown protectionists in the reign of Trump. Take talk show host Hugh Hewitt. Yesterday, he announced his fealty to protectionism (4/3/2025), eliminating all pretense. The arguments are the same, old and worn out as those of 17th century French mercantilists (refuted by Adam Smith) and the central planners of the 1980s Democrats’ “industrial policy” (in opposition to Reagan’s tax cuts, free markets, and free trade). The Republican Hewitt is now a 1980s Democrat, or an acolyte of Louis XIV’s First Minster of State, Jean-Baptiste Colbert.

The operative catalyst of the flip-flop is the presence of Donald Trump. A mania builds around a person and others quickly fall in line. The Right and its media web are as busy discrediting themselves in their fealty as the legacy media in their fawning support of the Democrat Left.

Warning! Choose wisely the horse to hitch your wagon.

The big question remains. Are we now ruled by an imperator, a person powerful enough to dismantle with a single stroke of his pen the long-established and peaceful economic arrangements of millions of people? Are our choices limited to Caesarism or neo-Marxism? It seems to be so. It’s the 1920s Berlin street confrontations of extremists all over again. In such circumstances, can the republic long survive? I am beginning to have my doubts.

RogerG

Gosplan? Simple. It was the central economic planning agency of the Soviet Union. It was from there that communist party apparatchiks tried to fine-tune and calibrate the Soviet economy – insular, isolated, and incompetently self-sufficient as it was. After 74 years, the whole contrivance imploded in one day, December 26, 1991. Poof! Gone! The Trump crowd is intent on imitating the game plan.

General Secretary Trump declared today, April 2, to be “Liberation Day”. It’s the day when we begin to experience the joy of paying more for automobiles and auto parts. Thanks to MAGA apparatchiks who will successfully (?) fine tune our economy and trade, the workers’ manufacturing paradise will soon be upon us. “Liberation Day” will soon join “Dekulakization” (google it) in the glorious annals (?) of state planning. High hopes, but not likely.

Stalin had Lavrenty Beria as his chief cheerleader and confidante till his death. Trump has a palace coterie of them, including Vice President Vance. Trump sneezes and they immediately rush him with Kleenex boxes. The guy says “tariffs” and they say, “How high, how many?”

Nobody questions it, in spite of careers spent lambasting them as the height of central panning folly. Take a look at the venerable Heritage Foundation, a leading conservative think tank in the forefront of the Reagan Revolution. Dominic Pino of National Review lays out the duplicity in the group’s flipping from free trade to protectionism. He garnered 52 articles and reports from 1983 to 2016 criticizing protectionism and advocating free trade (see #1). Now, Heritage’s president Kevin Roberts is a fulminating protectionist:

“President Trump’s reciprocal tariffs are a tool of statecraft that can level the playing field . . . . Tragically, trade policies over the last several decades coincided with middling economic growth, stagnating middle-class wages, a mass exiting of the labor force by young people, the breakup of the American family, and decaying communities.”

Anyone who says otherwise, according to Roberts, is pasted with “globalist”. No argument, just name calling. All of it is at the behest of the glib, ill-informed assumptions of Donald Trump.

They won’t get a dime from me.

The sycophancy is revolting. The vitriol is an insult to civility. Vance’s attack on RedState blogger Bonchie sets the tone (see #2). Bonchie questioned the wisdom of Vance’s enthusiasm for tariffs. Quickly Vance proceeded to heated jargon by tarring opposing views as “braindead liberalism”. Then came the American victimhood spiel. Go ahead, read it for yourself (see #3). VP Vance is a hot mess.

Marxist central planning was thought to be necessary because the working classes are victims. Trump and his MAGA posse want central planning of trade because . . . the working classes are victims. Hmmmm, sound familiar?

Central planning is a dog that won’t hunt, and never did. That’s because economic “fine tuning” is illusory. We were warned by economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises a half century or more ago. The “knowledge problem” looms over us. There is no small group of sages that has enough knowledge to address all the unintended consequences of its commands, whether it be regarding steel production or trade. Unforced errors abound. Government manipulation of one sector will lead to unforeseen harms to others. Crap will happen.

The quasi-socialist Democrats refuse to learn the lesson. Now, Republicans joined the ranks of dolts.

RogerG

Sources:
1. “The Heritage Foundation Was One of Free Trade’s Strongest Supporters”, Dominic Pino, National Review, 3/31/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/03/the-heritage-foundation-was-one-of-free-trades-strongest-supporters/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=second
2. “Sorry, Mr. Vance, Things Are Not the Same as People”, Dan McLaughlin, National Review, 3/31/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/03/sorry-mr-vance-things-are-not-the-same-as-people/
3. Bonchie/Vance X feed at https://x.com/TimesBChanging/status/1906201911453171977

Yes, California and its urban satraps are a collection of lefty clown shows. Lefty clown troupes are popular in the state, until something happens to burn the place down or their neighborhoods deteriorate into a hellscape. Yet, their popularity may not dim even then. For the rest of us viewing the scene from the outside, charred mountainsides and home tracts and the nihilistic urban encampments aren’t exactly a come-hither look for the state.

Clown shows are popular in other places. The foreign policy clown show of Donald Trump has taken over the executive branch, and California-level chaos will be visited upon the rest of the world and us through the naïveté of a real estate developer (Trump) and his real estate lawyer sidekick (Witkoff), and a supporting cast of others in face paint. Today, clowns are trendy on both the Left and Right.

Why are we attracted to clownish political leaders in this day and age? Interesting question, and one with an answer. Clowns are what the crazies in the parties’ bases will give us. Democrats are doubling down on transgenderism (XY girls in XX girls’ spaces, teenage genital mutilation, etc.) and neo-Marxist class war and eco-totalitarianism. Republicans are busy twisting themselves in knots justifying a trade war and the unraveling of our alliances and an appeasement push. Replacing one set of clowns for another will alternatively give us a ravaged way of life at home and a world debilitated by a weakened America standing alone, isolated.

The venerable Thomas Sowell warned us in 2015: “What is even more remarkable is that, after six years of repeated disasters, both domestically and internationally, under a glib egomaniac in the White House [Obama], so many potential voters are turning to another glib egomaniac to be his successor [Trump].” (See #2)

Today, Trump is on the run to catch up with his 2024 campaign rhetoric. On the trail, he declared that he’ll solve the Ukraine War in 24 hours. He backtracked. Earlier this month, he admitted (see #1), “Well, I was being a little bit sarcastic when I said that.” Do ya think!? We’re entering the third month of that pledge. How’s he going to achieve it in whatever time scale? By the only means at hand: bullying the Ukrainians into making concessions and pandering to Putin. We used to call that appeasement. That old and threadbare cliché, “Some take Trump seriously, others take him literally”, is banality devoid of any real meaning. He is now president and he is blundering.

Trump’s real estate lawyer pal Steve Witkoff – Yes, real estate lawyer! – is active in the Gaza and Ukraine theaters. Being a lawyer, and Trump being a developer, both see the world as transactional: you get something, I get something. Of course, their transactional experiences of life occurred in the padded romper room of American rule of law, of tort and bankruptcy laws. However, the big wide world isn’t so accommodating, or as predictable. If you apply the bargaining approach of New York contractors to the world’s thugs, miscreants, and naked aggressors, you’ve just taken a blow torch to rectitude. For instance, to Stalin in the 1930s, we’ll give you 3 million Ukrainians (the 1930s Holodomor) and diplomatic recognition in return for trade concessions for American exports. It boggles the mind.

Witkoff recently confessed to his gullibility about Hamas, gullible about the ways of the world outside the cocoon of American corporate law. On Fox News Sunday (3/23/2025), he said about Hamas in the Doha talks, “I thought we had a deal, an acceptable deal. I even — I even thought we had an approval from Hamas, maybe that’s just me getting — getting, you know, duped . . .”. Try not to forget that Hamas are the same people who hunted down over 1,200 Israelis, murdering, raping, torturing men, women, children, the young and old, anyone who happened to be in the way, taking hundreds as hostages, many to die mercilessly in captivity. Negotiations at this point devolve into how much will Hamas get away with.

Bewilderingly, Witkoff is willing to admit to being “duped” by Hamas but not by Putin. On Putin, Witkoff takes on the role of Lenin’s “useful idiot”. He sounds like the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens after visiting the Soviet Union in 1919: “I have seen the Future [sic] and it works.”

In an interview with Shannon Bream of Fox News, Witkoff said about Putin (see #2), “I feel that he wants peace.” Once again, try not to forget that Putin has interfered in Ukraine for decades, attempted assassinations of Ukrainian leaders, subdued two provinces in the east of the country, seized Crimea in 2014, and in 2022 tried to decapitate the country’s government and conquer the rest. Come to think of it, Putin is busy constructing a Russian Third Reich – the czars, the USSR, and now Putin’s Russian Empire. History is highly instructive here. Third Reiches are hard to pacify without giving away the store.

The ploy requires “useful idiots”, American “useful idiots”. Trump brands Zelensky a “dictator”, who by the way was elected and functions with a duly elected parliament, badgers him in the White House, and strangles the victim with a cut-off of intelligence sharing and arms. Trump continues to call Putin “a man of peace” and in the past has called him a “genius” and “saavy”. Outlandishly, he blamed Ukraine for starting the war. The UK’s Boris Johnson’s retort was succinct (see #5):

“Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.”

Putin’s poodle, indeed. This isn’t bargaining with union bosses or local politicos for a rezone, all operating within the context of law, DAs, grand juries, and the courts. Bluntly put, Trump is running way outside his lane.

What Trump and his coterie are bringing to foreign policy they promise for international trade and our alliances. Trump’s schtick is American victimhood. In Trump’s fevered imagination, we are the patsies of the world, as if we get nothing out of the deal, as if 20-25% of the world’s GDP means nothing. He peddles the “trade deficit” as if it is a form of fiscal calamity. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s a numerical concoction with very little bearing on the state of the economy. It’s the kind of thing that a halfwit peddles because he doesn’t know any better.

But it provides great cover for his cherished tariffs. Tariffs are like a safe space for a drunk to drink themselves into an early grave. They allow us to blame others without taking stock of our own malfeasance in the diminishment of certain sectors of our economy (manufacturing and the primary industries). The Rust Belt became rusty when American labor laws empowered our avaricious labor unions to cannibalize the very companies that they rely on for their paychecks.

Companies fled Big Labor’s garroting by doing what Californians have been doing for the past few decades, fleeing. In this context, fight or flight leads to flight, flight to right-to-work states or more accommodating foreign lands. Michigan’s loss is Tennessee’s gain. Anywhere looks better than the mailed fist of a blue state’s lefty hive and Big Labor hegemons. Understandably, trying to coax foreign companies into our snake pit will be met with mostly blank stares.

Fetid water is poured into the open wound in the form of eco-zealotry and their attendant administrative state. Not only that, but waiting in the wings are our armies of lefty social revolutionaries chomping at the bit to impose their designs on a company’s workplaces.

Trump’s beloved tariffs mask the reality of our own policy misconduct. Here again, we have the esteemed economist Thomas Sowell commenting on Trump’s first go-around with tariffs in a 2018 interview with Thomas Hazlett of Reason Magazine (see #6):

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Hazlett: Thoughts on the Trump trade war?

Sowell: Oh my gosh, an utter disaster. I happen to believe that the Smoot-Hawley tariffs had more to do with setting off the Great Depression of the 1930s than the stock market crash. Unemployment never reached double digits in any of the 12 months that followed the crash of October 1929, but it hit double digits within six months of passage of Smoot-Hawley, and stayed there for a decade.

Hazlett: What about the view by President Trump that other countries are ripping us off by running trade surpluses?

Sowell: It’s pathetic. The very phrase “trade surpluses” gives half a story. There are countries that supply mainly goods, physical goods, and there are other things like services that other countries provide, and the United States gets a lot of money from providing services. To talk about one part of the trading and ignore the other part fails to understand that money is money no matter whether it’s from goods or services.

When you set off a trade war, like any other war, you have no idea how that’s going to end. You’re going to be blindsided by all kinds of consequences. You do not make America great again by raising the price to Americans, which is what a tariff does.

******

All of a sudden, shape-shifting, free-trade Republicans take on the protectionist mantle of Reed Smoot and Willis C. Hawley (Smoot-Hawley Tariff) or the failed 1890 McKinley Tariff, which had to be repealed in a short eight years. A boisterous firebrand takes over the party, has an avid clique of fans in the base, and the rest of the leadership is intimidated into submission. It’s awful to watch.

The absurdity reaches new depths in the plagiarizing of the Democrats, of the Joe Biden claque – yes, that Joe Biden, “Slow Joe” in Trump’s words. Well, “Slow Joe” Trump stole the Democrats’ argument for his automotive tariffs.

“Emergencies” are great way to shoehorn tariffs into law, while, better yet, wrapping them up in “national security”. Biden used the Defense Production Act to impose much of the Green New Deal. Trump’s choice is the national security provisions of Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act to tariff-bash automotive imports. Either way, whether it be Biden’s greenie infatuations or Trump’s obsession with American victimhood, the purpose of the law in its plain language shouldn’t be allowed to get in the way of a policy fetish.

To Biden, or whoever ghost-wrote his apologia, the actual suicide pill of the Green New Deal was a matter of national survival. Huh? Yeah, go figure. Trump turns around and pushes automobile tariffs as the Strategic Air Command of national defense when the report above his signature claimed (see #7), “. . . automobiles and certain automobile parts are being imported into the United States in such quantities and under such circumstances as to threaten to impair the national security of the United States.” Get that? Affordable cars and affordable parts are the equivalent of Russian nukes aimed at us in first-strike numbers. Can it get any crazier?

But it does. Trump and his people ritually bash Biden and, at the same time, use Biden’s people to scratch their tariff itch. They cite a 2023 U.S. International Trade Commission report to try and paint Trump’s tariffs as a boon to the U.S. economy (see #7). Of course, missing from the Trump memo was the Biden report’s evidence of greater losses in related industries. Economists, no matter their orientation, can’t completely ignore the concept of trade-offs. But Trump can, and often does.

Trump doesn’t shirk from using the propaganda ministries of the Left to advance his agenda of American victimhood. Maybe that’s because Trump is part leftist, that being his desire to direct the economy and everyone in it according to his likes. So, he grabs Big Labor’s mouthpiece in the Economic Policy Institute, long a booster of tariffs and ally of today’s neo-socialist Democratic Party, to refute the charge of an inflationary impact of tariffs (see #7). It’s nonsense. Tariffs raise prices in the affected industries, and sap resources and depress activity in other parts of the economy. They distort the economy to the benefit of small groups and spread harm to many others. One goes up, many others go down. Trump’s 2018 tariffs on aluminum and steel were a boon to the United Steelworkers union but wreaked havoc on many more workers in American automotive, appliance, and fabricator plants.

Amazingly, Trump uses Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen as an authoritative source (see #7). She tried to justify Biden’s tariffs as Trump is doing the same when she said, “I don’t believe that American consumers will see any meaningful increase in the prices that they face.” Trump can’t decide if Democrats were a disaster or a beacon of truth.

America under Trump is coaxed into Alice’s Wonderland and down the rabbit hole. Thugs are “peaceful” and “geniuses” and fellow friendly and humane democracies are “dictatorships” and “starters” of wars. Foreigners ought not do business with us. Woe be to them if they should ever achieve a trade surplus with us. They’ll be quickly relegated to the ranks of exploiters and victimizers and subject to punishment.

The whole thing is a clown show, and not befitting of a great power.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “Trump says he was ‘being a little bit sarcastic’ when he promised to end Ukraine war in 24 hours”, Sarah Fortinsky, The Hill, 3/16/2025, at https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5197961-trump-says-he-was-being-a-little-bit-sarcastic-when-he-promised-to-end-ukraine-war-in-24-hours/
2. “Trump Envoy: Hamas ‘Duped’ Me; ‘I Don’t Consider Putin a Bad Guy’”, Jim Geraghty, National Review, 3/24/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-envoy-hamas-duped-me-i-dont-consider-putin-a-bad-guy/
3. “Why Have Elections?”, Thomas Sowell, Townhall, 9/15/2015, at https://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2015/09/15/why-have-elections-n2052085
4. Don’t forget the vile Trump post about Zelenskyy and Ukraine on Truth Social from Feb. 2025. You can read it here: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114031332924234939
5. “Trump Called ‘Putin’s Poodle’ as European Media Decries Ukraine Remarks”, Newsweek, 2/20/2025, at https://www.newsweek.com/trump-putin-european-media-decries-ukraine-remarks-2033772
6. “Thomas Sowell Returns”, Thomas W. Hazlett, Reason Magazine, December 2018 issue, at https://reason.com/2018/11/26/thomas-sowell-returns/?utm_medium=email
7. “Trump’s Bidenesque ‘Fact Sheet’ on Tariffs”, Dominic Pino, National Review, 3/27/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trumps-bidenesque-fact-sheet-on-tariffs/

In some places and states across America, affordable, reliable energy isn’t an option. People are punished with higher rates for a reluctance to install solar panels on their roofs. By government command, transportation is increasingly restricted to EVs or public transit. A simple plastic bag to carry your groceries to the car is outlawed. Freedom of conscience is under assault in school curriculum and pedagogies, and in the government empowerment of ideologically driven hypersensitivities in a broad censorship (“cancelled”). Any competing spheres – church, family – are left to atrophy.

What’s all this about? It’s about the end of the individual, a surrender to the state, a reduction of nearly everything to the politics which is the mother’s milk of the overarching state.

It’s stifling; it’s smothering; it forges malignant and distorted personalities. A callousness is turned loose. Others have written about it, particularly those who had a front row seat at the dawn of its appearance in the late 19th and into the 20th centuries, people like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arthur Koestler, Boris Pasternak.

Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago” is an autopsy of this deformed personality. Watch this scene from the film version of “Dr. Zhivago”. In it we see an accidental meetup between Zhivago and Strelnikov, a radicalized former student who is now a full-fledged commander in the Red Army, a committed Bolshevik, and utterly heartless: “The private life is dead.” Watch the interaction between a man with the full complement of human sensibilities and the stunted psyche of the ideological zealot. It’s frightening, and more common today than you think.

It’s found on the streets (torching Teslas, riots, leftist antisemitism, Antifa, BLM), on our college campuses, in K-12, in Hollywood, in the supermajorities of the California legislature, the Democratic Party base, throughout the expanding administrative state, throughout the commanding heights of the culture. No, it can’t be dismissed as a mere Soviet artifact. It’s a personality disorder engendered by a monstrous belief system. Sadly, the ill-consequences and sufferings of people, intended or not, are made irrelevant.

Please view the accompanying clip.

P.S.: After Zhivago leaves Strelnikov’s presence, a soldier says to Zhivago, “You’re lucky!”

RogerG

“Be honest, like hypocrisy isn’t in fashion anymore.” —- authorship unknown, but often attributed to Kevin Young, BYU men’s basketball head coach

*******

Are our core principles only held dear when they can be enlisted against someone we don’t like? Immediately thereafter, are they then made pliable to the advantage of someone we like? Then, are they really “core principles”, or simply something to be dispensed in the fawning of a toady?

Interesting questions. Obama had his pen and phone. Biden had his edicts on student loan forgiveness, eviction moratoriums, the initiation of DEI racism throughout the federal government in violation of law and court precedents, the imposition of transgender ideology on our girls, refusals to faithfully execute immigration law, and on and on. You’d think that we had enough of the autocratic presidency.

“Autocratic” can only apply to the other side. Right? Not so. For Trump’s most fervent supporters, he can do no wrong. Original intent, The Constitution, limited government, the separation of powers, and the rule of law have no more bearing than they did under the two previous donkey party occupants of the Oval Office. Trump is different, they say. Really? Let’s be honest, Trump apologists want an s—o—b so long as he is their s—o—b.

In reality, people will flip on a dime at the behest of their guru. Free trade Republicans become trade central planners and mercantilists overnight. How can a president apply tariffs at his pleasure, impose them or repeal them at will, a power constitutionally granted to Congress? The answer is “emergencies”. The International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 and the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 have been exploited to declare the “emergencies” that are used to justify the making and enforcement of tariff law by presidential edict (see #1). To appear more convincing, rhetorically thread the “emergency” into national security and you’re home free. On tariffs, Article II (executive) is also Article I (legislative). Trump enthusiasts have no qualms but were outraged when Obama and Biden discovered their phone and pen. For Trumpers, let’s get on with it. So much for Congress’s Section 8 power to regulate trade. Congress gave it away, and Trump slips into a phone booth to become Super Tariff Man. Not my words, his (see #2).

Trump’s latest “emergency” against our USMCA trade partners – Mexico and Canada – is fentanyl and illegal immigration. A matter for border and contraband enforcement becomes a trade issue, addressed by a, you guessed it, tariff. Ignore the fact that Canada is an insignificant contributor to the problems, a much more minor player than, say, the municipal governments of California’s Bay Area or Chicago or Mexico. Canada gets lumped in with the cartel states of northern Mexico because Trump needs a legal gimmick to pursue his tariff fetish, which is part of his view of America as a perpetual victim of others, friends or foes matters little to the guy. In fact, they’re all foes in the Trump mind.

What can’t squeeze into the excuse? Only the limitations of one’s imagination. For Trump, any issue, any matter, anything of concern is to be addressed with a tariff. Victor Davis Hanson, a routine champion of all things Trump, defended in a recent column Trump’s tariff infatuation by reciting Trump’s usual blustering about America as victim of the world (see #3). Don’t like the defense budgets of other countries, tariff them. Don’t like a country’s trade surpluses with us, while blindly worshipping these numbers with greater reverence than AOC does a Greenpeace report on global warming, tariff them. Naturally, tariff these “victimizers” into oblivion.

Friends and foes alike; well, actually, mostly our friends and allies will get the treatment, which will turn them into enemies because they can’t rationally pursue the destruction of their economies in the ways approved by the Trump Trade-Balance Clan. And not even a murmur from the Gumbies who were formerly outspoken for economic freedom. Free traders yesterday, enthusiasts of government micromanagement today. It’s amazing how quickly a person of principle can become a lickspittle.

It’s amazing how quickly Trump Republicans, knowingly and unknowingly, sound like Democrat, big-government types of recent memory. Remember Lester Thurow? He was a 1980s-prominent MIT economist and booster of the same big government fine-tuning of the economy that can be traced back to Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism through FDR’s New Deal to Obamacare to Biden’s multi-trillion-dollar American Rescue Plan/The Infrastructure Bill (an alias for the unpopular Green New Deal)/The Inflation Reduction Act (actually “enhancer” should replace “reduction”), and now to Trump’s tariff craze. A favorite at Democrat confabs and policy circles, Thurow was an advocate of “industrial policy” which is big-government micromanagement of trade through the use of subsidies, tariffs, quotas. Encapsulating Thurow’s thoughts is an invitation into the Trump mind. Don Boudreaux, George Mason University economist, has described Thurow’s ideas in ways that would sit well in Trump’s inner circle (see #5):

“Most ominous, Thurow … warned, was our failure to compete effectively against the clever Japanese who, unlike us naive and complacent Americans, had the foresight to practice industrial policy, including the use of tariffs targeted skillfully and with precision. Trade, you see, said Thurow (and others) is indeed a contest in which the gains of the ‘winners’ are the loses of the ‘losers.’ Denials of this alleged reality come only from those who are bewitched by free-market ideology or blinded by economic orthodoxy.”

Move over Thurow and the Democratic Party; here comes Donald Trump and his big-government coterie of JD Vance, Howard Lutnick, Jamieson Greer, Peter Navarro (former Democratic Party activist), and Stephen Miran. All of them occupying cabinet posts and filling key trade and economic advisory roles. Trump is uniformly surrounded by tariff buffs.

How anyone with a straight face can rail against the micromanagement of EV mandates and the war on fossil fuels and then approve of the micromanagement of consumers into making “approved” choices stretches the bounds of sanity. Aesop’s fable of the wolf (Democrat) in sheep’s clothing (Republican) resonates.

A Gumbyism on big-government micromanagement of trade is repeated in an embrace of flagrant appeasement. Peace through strength by forcing the victim (Ukraine) to acquiesce to the rape (Putin’s invasion)? It’s not enough to equate the rapist to the ravaged, but to tie her hands to her back seems a bit much. Don’t you think? Trump is busy dismantling Radio Free Europe/Radio Europe because they upset Putin. He cuts off intelligence sharing and military aid to bind Ukraine to his suzerainty over their survival. It’s one thing to support the victim and lose, quite another to assist the rapist. And this from the “shining city on a hill”? Disgusting.

If anyone should protest this rank immorality, get prepared for a fusillade of invective. Mike Pence, Trump’s former vice president, wouldn’t bow to Trump’s demands that he overturn the 2020 election. His adherence to traditional conservative principles will earn him this from JD Vance: “I think in reality that if Donald Trump wanted to start a nuclear war with Russia, Mike Pence would be at the front of the line endorsing him right now.”

Trump’s version of “peace through strength” – appeasement is more accurate – now opens the floodgates for the promiscuous tarring of any actual advocate of “peace through strength” as a warmonger. The old Republican foreign policy hand, John Bolton, was lambasted by the Republican National Committee on X with (see #6), “There is bipartisan agreement: John Bolton is a liar and a warmonger….” Yeah, bipartisan in that Republicans have become Democrats by slavishly following Trump’s lead. Remove Ronald Reagan’s portrait from GOP headquarters and replace it with George McGovern’s, or maybe Tom Hayden’s.

At what point are core principles made so flexible that they no longer exist? We need a reminder. Please watch Reagan’s general view of tariffs. It ain’t Trump’s.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “Trump is using a nearly 50-year-old law to justify new tariffs. It may not be legal.”, Ari Hawkins, Politico, 2/3/2025, at https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/03/trump-tariffs-legal-00202063
2. “’The greatest thing ever invented’: Tariffs become Trump’s miracle cure”, Zachary Basu, Axios, 9/25/2024, at https://www.axios.com/2024/09/25/trump-tariffs-economic-policies-harris
3. “Victor Davis Hanson: Are Trump’s tariffs really tariffs?”, Victor Davis Hanson, Las Vegas Review-Journal, 2/8/2025, at https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/opinion-columns/victor-davis-hanson/victor-davis-hanson-are-trumps-tariffs-really-tariffs-3279143/
4. “Exclusive: Rand Paul Tries to Organize Republican Senators Against Trump’s Tariffs”, Eric Cortellessa, Time, 3/18/2025, at https://time.com/7269118/trump-tariffs-republicans-rand-paul/
5. “Quotation of the Day…”, Don Boudreaux, Café Hayek, 3/12/2020, at https://cafehayek.com/2020/03/quotation-of-the-day-3096.html
6. On X, @GOP, 6/22/2020, at https://x.com/GOP/status/1275220782340325376?s=20

It’s hard to find a serious treatment of big policy issues, like Trump’s tariffs. Fox News prides itself on being “fair and balanced”. It may have been at one time, but not any longer. It is making the same mistake as MSNBC and much of the legacy media, just from the other end of the political spectrum. This is what happens when our news and information organizations become activists. Fox is shamelessly all-in for Trump as the legacy bunch has been for Democrats. “Fair and balanced”, hogwash.

Social media is chock-a-block with slipshod rationalizations. Hardly trustworthy. Punchy and spurious boilerplate bounce around the world wide web like popcorn in a popper. Elsewhere, people that you formerly trusted are no longer “fair and balanced”. Many lose credibility as they flip their opinions to align with the latest bandwagon. Trump and his MAGA are the latest bandwagon in the GOP as is DEI in the donkey party.

Look at Newt Gingrich. Trump tariffs, Newt is now gung-ho for ‘em. In 2015, his political reputation rested on free trade. He was four-square behind the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the 1990s, enthusiastically aligning himself with Pres. Bill Clinton as part of his self-described “Clinton-Gingrich Pro-American Growth Team” (see #1). Of course, today, he’s a Trump-and-tariff devotee. He cites an easy rationale for the about-face in the threat of Red China. That’s a handy one for him, but Trump wants to target his tariff missiles on anyone, friends and allies included. The Red China excuse no longer holds water.

So, what is a person to do? I suggest staying away from the activist media. Not all media are alike. The Hoover Institute would be a good place to start, and add the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and a good portion of the Wall Street Journal to the list. These and others have a better grasp of economics than the Trump consigliere at Fox.

The Wall Street Journal lays out the basics of tariffs and their ramifications in the accompanying short video. Trump and his partisans, without presenting a sound counterargument, will resort to their usual political jargon to dismiss WSJ as a bunch of “globalists”, etc. That’s not an argument; it’s the antics of the schoolyard typical of AOC and Trump.

Please watch the video. At least you’ll have the beginnings of a more levelheaded treatment of the issue.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “Gingrich reverses course on trade as Trump VP chatter swirls”, Shane Goldmacher, et al, Politico, 7/1/2016, at https://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/newt-gingrich-trump-trade-vice-president-225035